The winners of the 2015 Hans and Lea Grundig Prize The Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung opened the 2015 Hans-and-Lea-Grundig-Prize for entries in autumn 2014. The jury has now awarded the prize to Olga Jitlina, an artist from St. Petersburg; Lith Bahlmann and Matthias Reichelt, a curator and journalist, both from Berlin; and to a project at Bauhaus University Weimar that was coordinated by Ines Weizman, an architectural theorist. The jury was co-chaired by Dr Eva Atlan, curator of the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, and Dr Eckhart Gil- len, an art historian and curator from Berlin; it also consisted of Professor Irene Dölling, Henning Heine, Professor Ladislav Minarik, Dr Rosa von der Schulenburg, Oliver Sukrow, Dr Angelika Timm and Tanya Ury. The Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung awards the prize in memory of Hans and Lea Grundig for services to art, aesthetics and art mediation. Hans Grundig (1901–1958) was an anti-fascist artist from Dresden who was banned from working under the Nazis, arrested numerous times, and held between 1940 and 1944 in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. Lea Grundig (1906–1977) was repeatedly arrested by the Nazis be- fore leaving for exile to Palestine from 1939 until 1948. The prize was first awarded by Lea Grundig at the University of Greifswald in 1972, but the award only continued until 1996. In 2011, the Rosa-Luxemburg- Stiftung took over the competition from the University of Greifswald. In 2012, the prize was awarded to Oliver Sukrow, whose master’s thesis at the University of Greifswald focused on a historical-critical analysis of Lea Grundig’s controversial function as president of the East German Association of Visual Artists from 1964 to 1970. In 2015, the Hans and Lea Grundig Prize for art was aimed at contemporary pieces that could be described as “diasporistic” in the sense of R.B. Kitaj. “The diasporist lives and paints in two or more societies at once.” Diasporistic art “is contradictory at its heart, being both internationalist and particularist. It can be inconsistent, which is a major blasphemy against the logic of much art education, because life in Diaspora is often inconsistent and tense; schismatic contradiction animates each day” (First Diasporist Manifesto, 1989). More and more people are experiencing inconsistency, resistance, migration, exodus and exile; they live in one or more societies at the same time, but also dare to make art that is political in its radical- ism. Submissions to the art history category were to develop and explore the biographies and work of artists who had been persecuted and forced into exile by the Nazi regime. The art education category, in contrast, was dedicated to the mediation of socially critical museum and non-museum pieces from the 20th century in today’s cultural contexts. The award winners Olga Jitlina — winner in the art category Olga Jitlina is an artist from St. Petersburg who was born in the city in 1982, when it was still known as Len- ingrad. She is a child of the disintegrating empire of the USSR; a time of moral and economic decline and unfulfilled hopes for the establishment of a new, just and democratic society. She has learned to question herself, but also to protect herself from the temptations of old or new systems of belief and thus avoid the pain of disappointment. This is reflected in her humorous, interdisciplinary, poetic artistic language that covers everything from the roots of subculture to the flowers of civilization. The interdisciplinary nature of her work requires teamwork, but she provides the ideas and takes on the roles of designer and producer. Jitlina graduated with two degrees from St. Petersburg: in 2005, she completed a degree in philology at the Petersburg Institute of Jewish Studies; in 2007, she finished her art history degree at the Russian Acad- emy of Fine Arts. Since 2005 (when she was still a student), she has gained increasing levels of public atten- tion as an artist. Her academic background combined with her versatility helped her to quickly find a group of like-minded artists, and she now organises collaborative projects between different forms of media and artistic disciplines. She submitted four pieces to the competition. She developed a board game entitled Russia, The Land of Opportunity – migrant labor board game to enable everyone to experience the adversity facing migrants from the post-Soviet republics in today’s Russia. Her work From the 90-ies to Richmond articulates the experiences of Russian migrants in the US after leaving behind their home (country). Hodja Nasreddin on Mobile Discotheque is a performance piece for public spaces that challenges the dominant national- religious formative. Nasreddin in Russia. newspaper, issue 1, 2 (issue 3 has also since been published) is a satirical magazine in which the stereotypical ‘rogue’ from the Turkish-Islamic-influenced space between the Balkans and Central Asia plays out his knowledge-enhancing combination of folk wisdom, cunningness and crude humour in Russia. In the performance The Bronze Horseman, the area surrounding the Bronze Horseman statue in St. Petersburg is humbly cleaned by a brigade of migrant cleaners before they appro- priate it as a site of collective self-reassurance. Jitlina transforms central contemporary social issues through her original artistic language, with a humor- ous touch. She uses her great interest in the lives of “ordinary” people to subtly and subversively contrast the poetry of lived life with the empty pathos of the exercise of power. Jitlina’s work has long been displayed to international acclaim in countries such as Finland, Sweden, Poland, Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Austria and Italy; this has yet to occur in Germany. The jury was therefore even happier to support the work of this young and active artist by awarding her the 2015 Hans and Lea Grundig Prize, alongside prize money of €4,000, safe in the knowledge that she will soon gain further recognition from and delight audiences in Germany. www.olgajitlina.info Lith Bahlmann and Matthias Reichelt — winners in the art history category Lith Bahlmann and Matthias Reichelt have been awarded the 2015 Hans and Lea Grundig Prize, including €3,000 in prize money, for their art historical piece Ceija Stojka (1933–2013) — Sogar der Tod hat Angst vor Auschwitz. This work provided the first extensive study of the drawings and paintings by the Austrian Rom Ceija Stojka. As a child, Stojka was deported to the concentration and extermination camps in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen. During the late 1980s and until 2012, Stojka used an artistic and documentary genre to attempt to come to terms with the traumatic experiences she made during the Holocaust. Bahlmann and Reichelt’s trilingual (German/English/Romany) monograph of nearly 500 pages documents the almost 250 ink drawings Stojka produced between 1990 and 2012, together with the poetry she presented on the back of her illustrations. Lith Bahlmann is a freelance writer and curator who lives in Berlin and has published a number of catalogues containing artist’s monographs and produced exhibition publications; Matthias Reichelt lives in Berlin and is a freelance journalist covering cultural issues, as well as an author, curator and editor. Bahlmann and Reichelt displayed the vast majority of Stojka’s ink drawings and gouache paintings at Kunstverein Tiergar- ten — Gallery North, in Berlin. A selection of paintings was also on display at Galerie Schwartzsche Villa, belonging to Kunstamt Steglitz. In addition, the memorial and remembrance centre at the former concen- tration camp in Ravensbrück presented a collection of images by Ceija Stojka as part of a special exhibition that was organised in relation to this project. Bahlmann and Reichelt relied on personal records and conversations with Stojka and her relatives, as well as secondary literature. Commendably, they also enlisted the help of three other writers to secure a wide-rang- ing picture of the artist and her work. This also meant Stojka’s work could be studied from various angles. Whereas the historian Barbara Danckwortt describes the stages in the extermination policy targeting Sinti and Roma, the Hungarian art historian and Roma activist Timea Junghaus studies Stojka’s work in relation to the development and identity of Romani art and culture. In contrast, the Viennese director Karin Berger provides a subjective report about her engagement with the issue and work with the artist, resulting in two film portraits. Through in-depth research and professional appraisal, together with highly personal testimonies, Bahlmann and Reichelt’s book brings knowledge and awareness of the genocide committed against Sinti and Roma to a wider audience and contributes to ensuring that this issue is more firmly anchored in remembrance of the Holocaust. Ceija Stojka’s oeuvre is one of very few accounts of the genocide committed against Roma and Sinti from the perspective of a surviving Rom. “The Roma subaltern can only speak if the Roma minority will step out into the hegemonic territory and appear as a real power broker, and this is a much greater task than simply ‘identifying with some kind of imagined subalternity’” (Timea Junghaus). www.ceija-stojka-berlin2014.de Aus dem zweiten Leben. Dokumente vergessener Architekturen — winner in the art education category The winner in the art education category was a collective research and film project developed and exhibited by students from Bauhaus University Weimar’s Faculty of Architecture and Faculty of Media in the summer of 2014. The project combined historical research with its own film production. In many ways, this project was a successful experiment in university teaching and research as it enabled young filmmakers and artists to gain extensive insights into architecture, and students of architecture to learn filmmaking. The project’s approach to collective research led to a very special form of the appropriation of history: the study of urban spaces, buildings, plans and documents was linked to the documentation of people’s life stories in a manner that resulted in a wide-ranging research network.